Faint
by Kian
Summary: There are just some things you aren't meant to see... AU, excessive violence, bloodplay, just barely slashy.


**Title**: Faint  
**Author**: Kian  
**Pairings/Characters**: Sasu+Naru, Kakashi, Jiraiya  
**Warnings:** (gore, OOC, basically AU, excessive violence)  
**Disclaimer**: The anime series Naruto and its characters are copyright to the appropriate creators and companies. The individual under the pen name of "Kian" is receiving no profit from the distribution of this story, nor does said author have any intention to receive compensation beyond hopefully some verbal praise.  
**Notes**: This little…I don't know if I can call it a "story"…gives my "death-and-destruction" impulse free reign over the keyboard. The context for this is simple: three-way fighteroo between Sasuke, Naruto and Itachi gets somewhat out of hand and Kyuubi comes out to play. And, since it's Kyuubi, there will be violence and what will qualify as an OOC Naruto. Originally written for a vampire fic challenge on the LJ community, tempsmort, but never posted due to sudden insecurity complex on the part of the author. If the reader prefers a happier, fuzzy slipper variety of Naruto fic, the author suggests abandoning the plan of deciphering "Faint" and moving straight on to "Suffusing."

**Faint**

He rolled his head more than lifted it, thick coppery blood threatening to spill past his eyelashes into his squinted eyes. He couldn't keep them open anyway, as the light stabbed into his dilated pupils.

Where was he? What was going on? Had it always been like this? White noise was the only answer as it fogged every sense in a way that might have frightened him had he been collected enough to realize the difference.

A rasping grunt broke through the dense haze of his concussion and he forced his eyes to once again brave the dry heat of daylight. Blinking past the mucus that was forming over his scratched corneas, he sluggishly processed the agitated movements of the figures only a dozen or so feet from his resting place.

This wasn't his bedroom then. He was...somewhere else. Slowly, he began to examine his actual surroundings. There were trees, he discovered as another grunt and a low rumble drew his heavily watering eyes back to the figures nearby, still locked in their insistent dance. A slight spray of dirt fanned out behind one of the leaping feet and he nodded internally in satisfaction. They were, in fact, outside.

"..a..ke..."

Broken syllables rang out close to him and he felt his body lift up of its own will. No. Wait. Those poles pressed into his back must have lifted him. Poles? A face suspended itself above him; the face half concealed, but was singularly possessed of two dissimilar eyes. Familiar. A family member? He knew those eyes.

Another voice was near, speaking garbled words to the eyes, which looked away and back again. The eyes growled something in return. "..y...studen...oo, ...aiya."

He felt his body rock against the poles before feeling blissfully weightless, like a balloon that had been let go of, free to drift away on whatever breeze urged it.

His head solidly cracked against the ground and the white noise dissipated to make way for the pain that had been all but forgotten by his body while in shock.

"Sasuke!"

He looked towards his teacher, who was being helped up by Jiraiya. He fought down a rush of nausea and dizziness as he too fumbled into a standing position and attempted to appear composed for his teacher's sake. Some small part of his mind chuckled at his bravado despite the fact that he was leaning heavily on the tree behind him, hands clutching clumps of protruding bark painfully, all in an attempt to remain upright.

He resolved silently to ignore this voice and pay more attention to the fact that one of his hands could barely move at all, let alone grip anything. He must have broken some of the metacarpal bones when he had instinctively sought to break his fall.

Wait. Break his fall?

An inhuman growl ripped through the clearing, and despite protest from his inner ear and the various other injuries impatiently waiting to be identified, Sasuke turned to the noise. His breath froze in his burning lungs.

Nothing about what he saw now seemed real. Nothing about this could be shuffled off into some parameter of normal. When was he going to wake up? He heard Kakashi call to him, but the noise seemed far away, like a stray thought that came and went on a wing of fancy. His vision was swimming with Naruto and Itachi, fighting like wild animals, trying to tear each other limb from limb. And succeeding.

An arm, a maimed length of flesh, jounced across the ground to lay not three feet from him, swathed in the remnants of a kimono sleeve. He knew that arm, that hand. A long time ago, that arm had drawn him close to hug him. That hand had been the first to show him how to throw a kunai. Those fingers had petted his hair when he had improved. That arm had cast him aside. That hand had choked him to submission. Those fingers had tightened until his bones had given way. Bile seared the back of his throat.

His team mate, his comrade in arms had torn off his brother's arm and cast it aside like a raw piece of meat and was licking the blood from between his fingers in a slow, predatory motion. Was that even his team mate anymore? He could no longer tell.

Itachi gasped throatily, clutching his shoulder and falling to his knees. His faithful companion came to him, and was speared with countless kunai and shurikan thrown by the Naruto doppelganger in a blurred flash.

Sasuke's knees gave way and he slid down the tree.

What had happened after Itachi had tossed him into a rock, sending him sprawling like a rag doll? Naruto hadn't even been standing when he had tried to make a charge on his brother just minutes ago.

Kakashi called to him again, closer this time. When had Kakashi and Jiraiya gotten here?

"Naruto?"

He barely recognized his own voice, it shook and cracked so badly around the bile and tears. Tears?

Naruto...no, the thing that looked like Naruto, lazily swung its cerise eyes around to look at Sasuke. It leisurely grinned; murderous intent gleaming in the slit pupils and woven through the exaggerated lines of Naruto's normally gently dimpled cheeks. Pronounced canines dug cruelly into the soft lips of his friend and trickles of blood began to color his lips in a ruddy blur of hot liquid.

"The _human_ sleeps."

The voice was not Naruto's, but a ragged cross between a growl and a snarl. He heard Kakashi suck in a breath from somewhere nearby. Jiraiya grunted angrily. He idly wondered why Jiraiya was so attached to Naruto.

The monster looked at the huddled forms of the Akatsuki members and snorted derisively.

"They may have any other, but they won't have this human. He's _mine_."

The thing approached the discarded arm, lifting it up as one would a curious trinket or quaint bauble. Losing interest almost immediately, it tossed the limb to the ground near its owner, watching with demented amusement as it skipped across the topsoil and leaves. After the monster turned back to Sasuke, no one marked when or how the pair left the scene.

"Your blood smells good, _pup_."

He heard Jiraiya restrain Kakashi. The eyes that didn't belong to Naruto watched the scuffle over Sasuke's shoulder, a single canine mimicking a smirk around the blonde's too-small lips. It stepped forward, looming over his prone form. Sasuke's bleary and bloodshot eyes were riveted to the hands that did and did not belong to his friend, to Naruto. The little cuts and pale scars were as familiar to him as those on his own hands, but the sickly yellow and elongated claws, those were nothing of his comrade.

The hands moved and Sasuke tried to follow their progress up to brace on either side of his head.

"Here."

The voice crooned to him and when Sasuke looked forward again, he was nose to nose with the beast.

"Naru...Naruto?"

The lines around Naruto's eyes crinkled as if he were about to smile.

"No. Not today, boy."

Sasuke could have sworn he heard the chirpy lilt he knew so well somewhere underneath the menacing rumble. He closed his eyes, trying to grab onto that fragment of his comrade.

A hot, ragged tongue startled him backwards as it dragged languidly across his temple. His head jolted against the tree and the rough bark and once again he met the amused cerise eyes of the not-Naruto.

"Be still. Let me have a taste."

The tongue moved again, charting maps of blood across his forehead, cheek and jaw. Sasuke didn't move, didn't breathe. It sat back, looking delighted with itself.

"You taste good, human."

The eyes flashed blue just for a moment and the beast made a face of irritation.

"The kit is awake," it commented distractedly.

The fiery gaze trapped Sasuke again and another demented smile pushed the long canines past torn and bloody lips.

"Do you rely on the kit, human?"

"Rely on him?"

The beast didn't reply, but continued to eye him expectantly.

"Give him back to me."

That seemed to be good enough. The beast looked at him in a calculating manner before slightly nodding. He leaned forward to Sasuke's exposed neck and the ebony-haired boy rolled his head back to indulge whatever it was the beast wanted...so long as it would return Naruto. He could distantly hear Kakashi and Jiraiya arguing.

The pricks were an instant of pain and he hissed through clenched teeth as the tongue descended to lick the wound clean. Instinctively, he tried to pull away.

"It's all right, Sasuke."

There was no more growl, no more snarl. Just Naruto's hushed tenor murmuring in his ear and a warm, familiar hand on his shoulder.

"Naruto..."

"I'm here," he soothed, "It's going to be okay."

He felt the familiar chakra of his partner wreathe around him as he drifted away. And something else, like the whisper of a beast moving through the night

**END **


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